Page:Lives of British Physicians.djvu/307

 PARRY. 285 the mind associates it with all other trains of thought, reluctantly wanders from it, and returns to it with delight, as to its native home. " Feelings like these which have long made my professional pursuits my greatest pleasure, aided by the wish of emulating some great professional names, and by a strong desire that the world may be the better for me after I shall have left it for ever, have supported me under the privation of domestic and social gratifications, and under exer- tions incessantly 2:)ursued through sickness, sorrow, and pain. " The great book of nature, which is alike open to all, and is incapable of deceiving, I have hourly read, and 1 trust not wholly in vain. During the first twelve or fourteen years of my professional life, I recorded almost every case which occurred to me either in private practice or in the chief conduct of an extensive charity. A¥hen, after- wards, the multiplication of common examples seemed to me an unnecessary waste of inestimable time, which might be much more profitably em- ployed, I contented myself v/ith the more useful task of recording chiefly such cases, or, on a few ] occasions, such particular circumstances only of cases as led to the estabhshment of principles. This I have generally done on the spot, or rarely I deferred beyond the day of observation, always I rejecting what, on repeated and varied inquiry, I j have not been able fully to verify, gested themselves to me, I have immediately noted down, and afterwards carefully examined on all sides, and in every light. By this method, which
 * ' Whatever inferences from phenomena have sug-